apple juice

Around 3pm a co-worker waltzed into my office and said in a low voice, “Chipotle is giving away free burritos tonight, 5-6:30.”

My stomach became instantly happy.

@ 4:59PM I logged off, packed up and headed out the door. Chipotle’s new location is about halfway between work and home, so about 3 minutes later I arrived at the front door of Chipotle. Sure enough, they were giving away free burritos to train their employees in. (And it’s also a brilliant marketing move, as I watched car after car drive past, look at the line that now went out the door and into the parking lot, and vow to themselves to come back later)

The employees were off-the-hook cheer, almost creepily cheery. But that’s okay, there were free burritos to be had.

While in line, I had a good conversation with two early college students about the candidate, imploring them to do some more research.

When I got to the line I ordered my now customary, barbacoa with black beans, some hot, some corn salsa, and guacamole. Actually I’m usually 50/50 on the guac because it’s an absurd $1.25 extra, but tonight it was free. And it was good.

Wrapping technique was fair… I had my first PBM (partial burrito meltdown) in about a year and a half. But it was partly my fault as well. Kind of like the pitcher with a suspect defense behind him. The pitcher has the make a good pitch, and the defense has to back him up.

Anyways, it was excellent, they’re doing the free burrito thing tomorrow as well, and as such, I will be there.

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This was taken on the way out, somewhere in North Dakota. You can see Sonja’s orange sweater, she’s sleeping in the back.

Since I haven’t come up with any resolutions yet this year, I thought I could go back to last year’s and see how I did:

• Cook a more diverse lineup of food (buy cookbooks)
• Play more video games
• Get a reasonable workout program and stick to it (for more than a week)
• Play golf at least twice a month (in the summer)
• Don’t buy crap
• Sell extraneous computers and equipment on eBay
• Keep the desk and office clean
• Ride bike at least once a week in the summer

Okay first off, Cook a more diverse lineup of food (buy cookbooks), we did fairly well on this one. I can’t say we bought any new cookbooks, but we did at least go through the cookbooks and pick out new things to make. So on the whole, you could say I stuck to this one.

#2, Play more video games, easy one. Check!

#3, Get a reasonable workout program and stick to it (for more than a week). Failed miserably. With the exception of getting my arm in shape for softball last spring, I barely visted the gym. Like the Cubs, I will try again this year.

#4 Play golf at least twice a month (in the summer) I had my best golfing year ever, and I played a lot more than in the past. Which also cost more money, but what are you going to do? I even acheived my goal of scoring under 95 (92) and was pretty consistently hitting the mid-90’s by the end of the year. I hope to continue that this summer, and maybe even score under 90? The way things usually go with golf, I’ll be back up in the 120’s

#5 Don’t buy crap, #6 Sell extraneous computers and equipment on eBay, and #7 Keep the desk and office clean were all intimately related. For the most part things went well. I sold off two computers, threw away a bunch of other junk, bought a paper shredder, and for the most part kept the office clean. It’s a work in progress and I still tend to hang on to paper way longer than I need to, but on the whole, things are looking good.

And the last one on my list, Ride bike at least once a week in the summer failed pretty miserably as well. I won’t make excuses. It just didn’t happen.

Well looking back things went very well over the past year. This year I’m going to work on some of the things that didn’t go so well from last year, namely working out more since I was just absolutely beat when we were skiing last week!

After trekking across a good portion of the country, we are back in rochester. We travelled at least 3600 miles over the course of the journey, and it feels good to be back home again.

I will have some little pictures up soon, we did lots of fun stuff!

Some holiday fun with Anne and Doug!

Paul Krugman writes about Howard Dean’s confederate flag “quote” from last week…

Flags Versus Dollars

Howard Dean’s remarks about the need to appeal to white Southerners could certainly have been better phrased. But his rivals for the Democratic nomination should be ashamed of their reaction. They know what he was trying to say ó and it wasn’t that his party should go soft on racism.

Mr. Krugman is easily my favorite columnist at the NYTimes, and this is another fine column.

I’ve been back and forth on Dean in the past couple weeks, because although I think Dean would make an excellent President, more than anything we need to stop the slow motion train wreck in progress that is our current administration. So whoever that is, I’m happy. But I still think Dean can do it. There is something special about the whole campaign. We’ll see how it goes.